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Industrial land, not waterfront, is the port’s biggest challenge

A cargo ship laden with shipping containers heads to the Port of Vancouver in the nearby Tsawwassen location. While a significant amount of industrial land near the waterfront — where those shipping containers could be loaded and unloaded — has been lost in the last 30 years, very little has been added.

Photograph by: Kim Stallknecht
, Vancouver Sun

From the water, the shoreline of Vancouver Harbour reveals itself as a slightly uneasy blend of gritty industrial, upscale residential and relatively untouched land.

Families picnic and play with their dogs on an undeveloped beach that butts up against the Kinder Morgan loading dock, the terminus of a controversial pipeline that may or may not be expanded one day soon. Working waterfront melds into the backyards of homes or condos, then to expanses of trees and rocks, then back again. Pleasure boats buzz past stately ships and tough little tugs, and the SeaBuses patiently ply their routes, all seemingly in worlds quite different from the ones occupied by the others.

Still, with 640 kilometres of shoreline under the port’s jurisdiction, you wouldn’t expect it to run out of land any time soon.

Neither does Robin Silvester, the president and CEO of Port Metro Vancouver. At least, he doesn’t expect it to run out of waterfront.

But industrial land off the water that’s essential to service the port? That’s a different issue, and one that looks ever more challenging.

The waterfront, Silvester says, is relatively straightforward to manage.

True, the port has much less working land than it had in decades past, with big areas like Coal Harbour — named for the industry that used to dominate it — now irrevocably gentrified. At the same time, what’s left of the working port must accommodate newcomers like recreational boaters and float planes, as well as more cargo — a lot more, with last year’s total reaching the equivalent of 2.5 million six-metre containers and projected growth of five or six per cent a year.

But what eats up space on the water’s edge, he said in an interview, isn’t so much loading and unloading, but rather storing products waiting to be shipped out or just landed. This is particularly an issue in Vancouver as, unlike most North American ports, it conducts nearly equal two-way trade. It ships out nine containers filled with wood, aluminum ingots or other Canadian products for every 10 containers of manufactured goods or components arriving from abroad.

“We’ve become very good at improving the efficiency of the supply chain,” he said.

Thus, he believes, it will be possible to handle significantly more cargo with the existing land base for the next several years.

As well, the port has four major working locations. The north shore of Burrard Inlet would, on its own, probably be the largest working port in Canada, he said. But there are also busy and efficient facilities on the south shore, on the Fraser River where the port is acquiring more land by buying up old mill sites, and at Deltaport, which has been built out into Georgia Strait off Tsawwassen.

So, with several incremental expansions and cargo-handling improvements now underway or planned, and with the addition of a second container terminal at Deltaport that he hopes and expects will be approved and built within the next few years, Silvester doesn’t foresee a bottleneck.

He does, however, expect a continuing shift of the kind of facilities in demand with less bulk cargo — products like lumber that are loaded on pallets, often onto roll-on, roll-off ships — and more containerized shipments. And this feeds his concern about running out of industrial land away from the water.

“A big portion of the container cargo gets unpacked from 40-foot containers and put into 55-foot rail boxes, which are more efficient to be hauled across the country. The marine containers then go, often literally, across the road and get loaded with forest products or aluminum ingots or grain to go out.

“That’s where a lot of jobs related to the port come from. It’s also what requires land. And it’s where we really feel the pressure.

“I don’t know of a single example, with the exception of treaty land down in Tsawwassen, of the creation of industrial land in the Lower Mainland in the last 30 years. And we can reel off example after example of loss.”

The capacity to import and export is important to shoppers as well as businesses and workers right across Canada, but the direct jobs at the port are far more important to Greater Vancouver than a lot of residents realize.

“One in 12 people have a job because of the port, just related to the supply chain — never mind the person working in a shop selling goods imported through the port.

“The direct longshore employment is about 5,000, and there are about 2,500 truck drivers. There are also people working in companies maintaining port assets, designing equipment to go in the port, people working in accounting firms who supply services to the port, people who work in the railway, all those sorts of people.”

Looking at the gentrification — and the residential land prices — in Vancouver, and the expansion to Deltaport and the river, a question arises about whether the port could, or might ever, move from its base in Burrard Inlet. That happened in Sydney, Australia, which moved most of its cargo activity from the central harbour to new facilities in nearby Botany Bay while Silvester was working there.

“Here, there are two constraints.

“The first is capital. If you look at the amount of invested capital just around Burrard Inlet, it’s billions and billions of dollars.

“If you take just one example, Neptune, the coal-potash terminal over on the North Shore, they’ve invested within the last five years about $300 million. If you look at Centerm, which I used to run, we invested $160 million in just a couple more cranes and an extension of the berth.

“To recreate the amount of capacity on the North Shore alone would be a huge capital investment. So, while the idea that you could turn it into residential condos and get a lot of value sounds seductive, I’m not sure it would wash its face economically.”

The second reason is even more of a challenge, Silvester said. Where would the port authority put the cargo-handling facilities now in Burrard Inlet?

“We’re in the middle of a significant program to expand our container business,” he said. “As part of that, we have to look at all possible options. We’re likely to go into an environmental permitting process for the expansion of Deltaport.

“We’re confident we can mitigate the impact of adding another container terminal like the one we’ve got.”

But moving Burrard Inlet operations to Delta would require overlaying another huge container terminal on top of that, plus three more facilities roughly the size of Westshore on Roberts Bank, which is the largest coal-handling facility in Canada.

“I don’t think we could find the environmental mitigation opportunity to make up for that kind of impact. Never mind the infrastructure you’d have to build on some of the best farmland in the world. I don’t think it could be done.”

B.C. doesn’t have many other locations that could be considered for port development, and the few contenders outside the Lower Mainland all have challenges of their own.

“There are only three locations with a railway — Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Kitimat. Prince Rupert is already expanding. They have, in some ways, an even more difficult mitigation challenge because they haven’t had much development. We can create compensatory habitat by restoring from problems of the past. They don’t have that opportunity.

“Kitimat has a similar situation.

“So if you look at Western Canada, I don’t think we could create the amount of capacity you’d need if you took away what we have.”

A cargo ship laden with shipping containers heads to the Port of Vancouver in the nearby Tsawwassen location. While a significant amount of industrial land near the waterfront — where those shipping containers could be loaded and unloaded — has been lost in the last 30 years, very little has been added.